Dreamer
by Miss Becky
Summary: Under the unforgiving light of day, he sleeps and dreams.


Dreamer

Author: Miss Becky

Disclaimer: I do not own them. Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy do. 

Summary: Under the unforgiving light of day, he sleeps and dreams. 

Spoilers for S6, up through OMWF

Author's Note: This is the first Buffy fanfic I've ever written, so I welcome all feedback, both positive and negative. I only ask that you be kind. 

Thanks: To Jen. She knows why.

*****

Under the unforgiving light of day, he sleeps and dreams.

Always the same dreams, yet with enough gentle variations to prevent him from growing complacent. The same melody is there every time, only slightly changed, so sometimes he can scarcely tell the differences, and other times he barely recognizes the tune. A fugue, they call it, variations on a theme. Oh, the others would laugh if they knew, but the wanker in his former life had been a bloody awful musician, too, not just a poet.

_You're beneath me,_ she says, and he feels his world crumble just a little bit more. He does not know how much longer he can keep backing up and still remain on solid ground. Soon everything will collapse beneath him, and he is so tired of all this that he can only wonder dully who he will take with him in that fall.

_Why do you care? _laughs the Hellbitch, and she is furious that he will not tell her about the Key, but she is also genuinely curious. She has never met anything like him, soulless and yet noble. _The Slayer would never even look twice at you. Why are you trying to help her?_ He cannot answer that question even to himself, and he is certainly not about to try and explain it to this bloody bitch. Let her keep guessing.

_But I want you to know that I did save you. Not when it counted, of course. But every night after that, I saved you._ She just stares at him with those ancient eyes, and he wants to scream hit her make her bleed. Anything but let her just sit there, her existence forcibly made a living hell that she has no choice but to continue living. She is too strong to take the coward's way out and return to the paradise she knew. Her strength mocks his own, for he cannot forget how appealing the sunrise looked on those first mornings after she was gone.

_I thought you wanted me to stay away from you. Isn't that what you sang to me?_ The others mock him because that is what they do, but he has had enough practice by now that he no longer hears their taunts. He sees only her, hears only her. And in her voice he hears what the others do not – that she rejects him only because she does not know anything else. Life has been cruel to her, and she has lost everyone she has ever let into her heart; she decided long ago not to take another chance. If he ever sees his grandsire again, he will kill the pouf, consequences be damned. Perhaps the Powers will cease meddling in her life then, and let her be.

_I know this isn't real. But I just want to feel._ A kiss. The first one that he considers real, for spellbound kisses are made of dreams, and when she kissed him in the crypt after the Hellbitch had done with him, he had thought she was only the plastic version of the dream. This, this kiss, is real. Her mouth is hungry and his hands rise to cup her shoulders, not daring to go any higher, lest he discover this, too, is an enchanted kiss and not for real.

Under the purple of twilight, he wakes and stares into the shadows. The dreams are little different than the waking life. They dangle hope before him and then snatch it away, and in his dreams he hears the laughter as clearly as he does when awake. He is the butt of the universe's most cruel joke, the one they all laugh at, a vampire in love with the Slayer.

He rises and prepares to go out, to find her and join her on patrol, these hours that she shares only with him. Maybe the world is laughing at him, but he is laughing back, under the pain. For he knows the secret to letting go of the dreams. 

Dreams fade when you wake. Reality is constant. And you never know what will happen next.

He steps out of the crypt and into the night, senses coming alive, stalking across the grass with the animal grace of a true predator. She is waiting for him, stake in hand, and when she sees him her face changes and her eyes awaken. 

It seems he is not the only one who dreams during the day.

END


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